Treatise on the Gods

"It appears that man, in his remote infancy, was by no means the lord of creation that he has since become. Abroad, he could barely hold his own against the dreadful beasts that roamed the fields, and at home he was no more than a compound of butler and gigolo. His wife, if his hunting failed or she espied another who struck her fancy, could turn him out at her will."

"Among the obscurer islands of Polynesia ...they [men] are homeless until the women take them in. They may set themselves up as priests and magicians, but the authority of a priest is determined by woman suffrage. They may consecrate themselves to politics and aspire to be chiefs, but no chief can function if the women laugh at him. ...He had no property save his spear, and no rights save the bare right to exist. ...The men's club is their one refuge, as it is the refuge of men without women in Christendom, but, like its Christian counterpart, it is dull and clammy. Dying, they issue into space as homeless ghosts, and wander about disconsolately until the prayers of women enable them to be born again, and the whole sorry round is resumed."

"Primitive man... We picture him as a glorious hunter engaged daily in heroic combats with saber-toothed tigers, but it is highly probable that he clubbed a thousand rabbits to death for every tiger that he so much as tailed, and that when he came home he was not infrequently given a caustic dressing down."

"The invention of agriculture... women could plant and reap as well as men, and they thus became independent economically, as they had always been independent politically and socially. It is very likely, indeed, that agriculture was a feminine discovery, for women monopolized it for countless centuries. We think of their work in the fields as slavery; in reality, it gave them the upper hand of men, especially in regions where the hunting was going off. No wonder the Earth Mother was the earliest really first-rate divinity!"

"She [Earth Mother] represented dramatically the high position of women in the world. ...Crops did not come out of the sun; they came out of the earth. Children did not issue from men; they issued from women. Man was a bystander, useful on occasions, but not a sharer in the miracle, not a contributor of his flesh. Neither, in the miracle of the fields, was the sun."

"When some primeval and forgotten Harvey discovered the physiological role of the father... It not only altered completely the fundamental structure of the family, and hence tribal government, and hence of human society in general; it also introduced a wholly new concept into the role of religion... the gods had started out as mere malign presences, with no visible purpose save to do evil; they had developed, step by step, into powers who could do both evil and good, and might be persuaded, by remonstrance and propitiation, to choose good; they had come to be personified, finally, in a beneficent mother-spirit, nourishing the needs and heeding the aspirations of man. Now they were ready to take the grandiose form of a gracious and all-powerful father—maker and guardian of heaven and earth."

"Man's view of the entire cosmic process changed as his view of the process of life changed. ...He must have a symbol of his own share in the great miracle of birth and growth—a divine inseminator and fructifier to stand beside the germinal Earth Mother... The obvious candidate was the sun-god. ...man saw in him, not only the symbol of fatherhood... but also a symbol of all the new dignities and prerogatives that went with it."

"The concept of a single omnipotent god, reigning in the heavens in solitary grandeur... was probably devised, not by theologians, but by metaphysicians. They proved there could be but one god, not by bringing up any overt evidence to that effect, but simply by appealing to what they conceived to be the logical necessities. The human race, on its more refined and exalted levels, accepted these proofs with the head, but never with the heart."

"All the great religions surround their chief deity with lesser presences, some of them potent enough to defy him. Christianity, as everyone knows, goes to the length of separating him into three gods, all theoretically parts of a single whole, but each, nevertheless, more or less autonomous. But though the early sun-god, like these later divinities, did not and could not sweep the first firmament of all rivals, he yet managed to seize the first place among them."

"He [the sun-god] was the special god of the now dominant and prancing male; he was the god of captains, kings, and... conquerors. ...they claimed to be his agents on earth; in widely separated regions, East, West, North, and South, they began to speak of themselves as Children of the Sun."

"They gave him [the sun-god] a high place and liked to think of themselves as his offspring, but for everyday purposes they used whole squads of lesser gods. Thus he was never omnipotent. Prudent men, in this or that emergency, turned to other helpers. If there were enemies to blast they appealed, perhaps, to the serpent-goddess... If there was a drought, they made application to the rain-god, the sun-god's old rival. If hunting was afoot, they had recourse to some god of the chase."

"The discovery of the physiological role of the father exalted more than man alone; it also exalted, especially after animals began to be domesticated, the ram and the bull. They appeared... as gods, often with rays or wings, no doubt to show their kinship to the sun. Man admired all such virile and gaudy animals, and liked to sweeten his reflections with the thought that he was like them. ...There were bulls among the gods of all the early peoples, from the North Sea to the Indian Ocean."

"One of the chief functions of the gods, at the dawn of trustworthy history, was to give their votaries success in war. The Old Testament is full of accounts of their feats in that direction, and so are all the other ancient records."

"The conquered knew quite well what had happened; their gods, in a fair fight, had turned out to be weaker than the gods of the other fellows. So it was probably common for them to come over to their notion..."

"The old gods had a way of hanging on, if only under cover. Even when the new ones were imposed by the sword, the old-timers lurked in dark and secret places... ready to burst forth at a convenient time. That happened all over Mesopotamia in the days of the great invasions, and the result was a hierarchy of gods that became enormously complicated, and even more or less antagonistic. Similarly in early America, when the Spaniards imposed Christianity upon the Aztecs and Mayans, the old gods of those peoples were not abandoned, but simply went into retirement and were soon peeping out again."

"Whenever a king accomplished a conquest of genuine difficulty and importance, he usually followed it with hints that he himself was a sort of god. Such hints did not fall ungratefully upon his lieges, for man has always been thirsty for heroes, and ever willing to see divine attributes in them."

"When the Teutonic pantheon first became known to the Romans it was full of gods who were hard to distinguish from men and women. ...The lives they led were really more operatic than divine, and when the time for it came they slipped into the music-dramas of Richard Wagner as easily as the Yahweh of John Calvin slips into the incantations at a hanging."

"At Rome, the cross-roads of the world, all the gods of East and West were mingled. There were so many of them that no one believed in them any more, not even the priests. ...When an emperor died, his body was burned on a great pyre, and an eagle was released, to carry his soul to the sky; thereafter he was a god. Some of the later emperors were deified while they still lived, like Alexander of Macedon, the pharaohs of Egypt, and the Mikados of Japan. The truth is that any respectable Roman, by the simple act of dying, might become a god; all he needed was children to worship his manes."

"Every religion, if it survives long enough, changes its ceremonials, and every one of them borrows constantly from the others."

"It would be hard to discover any act of a Christian priest, of whatever rite, that is not matched in the rituals of a hundred other religions, and there is scarcely a non-Christian usage or solemnity, however barbarous it may appear at first glance, that has no parallel in the operations of Christianity."

"Everything the Holy Church cherishes as peculiarly it own, from pedo-baptism to auricular confession and from holy communion to the monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, was hoary with age before Peter ever saw Rome."

"Four ideas lie at the bottom of all organized religions, whether ancient or modern, cultured or savage, to wit: 1) That the universe is controlled by powers of a potency superior to that of man, and that the fortunes of man are subject to their will. 2) That these powers take an interest in man, and may be influenced to favor him. 3) That certain men have greater capacity for influencing them than the generality of men. 4) That certain words and acts are more pleasing to them, and hence more likely to make them friendly, than other words and acts."

"The concept of infinity came in relatively late, even in Egypt, and... its first fathers were more likely metaphysicians than theologians. In looking backward, as in looking forward, early man was quite unable to imagine endless time. Always he concluded that the animal creation, including his own kind, must have a beginning, and the earth he walked on, with it. Sometimes he ascribed the act of creation to the gods, or to one of them, and sometimes he laid it to a potent being of lesser dignity, usually to a totem animal."

"The cosmogony of the Jews, as recorded in Genesis, was mainly borrowed from the Babylonians. According to A. H. Sayce, the creation myth that it embodies arose at Eridu, a town on the Persian Gulf. Here, he says in the Hastings' Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, "the land was constantly growing through disposition of silt, and the belief consequently arose that the earth had originated in the same way. The water of the great deep accordingly came to be regarded as the primordial element out of which the universe was generated. The deep was identified with the Persian Gulf, which was conceived as encircling the earth." In Genesis 1, 2, the Spirit of God moves "upon the face of the waters, "before there is anything else, even light. Not only are fish precipitated from their substance, but also "fowl"... and "great whales,"... Man himself appears to be watery, too, for, though in the next chapter he is represented as formed "of the dust of the ground," it is explained that just previously "there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground." This is a palpable echo of the Babylonian Gilgamesh legend, wherein Ebani, the first man, is fashioned of clay by the Goddess Ishtar."

"The Garden of Eden is also plainly Babylonian, for one of its rivers, the Euphrates, bears a Babylonish name, and another, the Hiddekel (no doubt the Tigris) is said to run "toward the east of Assyria." The Babylonians, whose notions of life after death were of the vaguest, believed that there was an earthly Paradise somewhere to the northwest of their country. In it, those mortals who were lucky enough to gain entrance dwelt with the gods, just as Adam dwelt with Yahweh in Eden, and from it flowed the four rivers that watered the earth. The very name of Eden seems to have been Babylonian, for in that language edina signified a pleasant plain. The Jews also got the Flood legend from the Babylonians, though in one form or another it was common throughout the East."

"The prodigious ages of the patriarchs, as given in Genesis v... show Babylonian influence, though here the Jews seem to have tempered imitation with a considerable moderation. To match Methusaleh, who lived 969 years, there were kings of Ur who reigned for 28,800, 36,000 and even 43,200 years!"

"The Flood legend is common to all parts of the world save only Africa, and even there it is occasionally encountered. ...The gods usually send the obliterating waters because man has become hopelessly wicked, but occasionally they do so for a trivial reason. ...The fable of the Fall of Man is also widespread, and nearly always, as in Genesis, it is based upon a violation of taboo. The first man, forbidden to go into some area reserved for their pleasure, or to bath in a certain pool, or to kill a certain animal, or catch a certain fish, does so notwithstanding, and is immediately doomed to suffer disease, famine and death."

"Christianity leans upon supernaturalism more heavily than any of its principal rivals, and there is in it, even in its more refined forms, a great deal that is irrational and incredible."

"As it [Christianity] exists today, it shows few elements that may be traced with any probability to its Founder. There is no reason to believe that He ever heard of the Virgin Birth, or of the mystical and unintelligible dogma of the Trinity, or even of Original Sin... or believing in the infallibility of the Pope. ...it never occurred to him that men should ever worship His Mother. His ethical teachings, like his Theology... in certain fields... have been completely turned upside down."

"It would probably shock Him [Jesus] profoundly to find Catholics doomed to Hell for neglecting their Easter duty and Protestants damned for drinking wine, for He held a cynical opinion of all priestly jurisprudence and wine to Him was a more natural drink than water."

"The simple fact is that the New Testament, as we know it, is a helter-skelter accumulation of more or less discordant documents, some of them probably of respectable origin but others palpably apocryphal, and that most of them, the good along with the bad, show unmistakable signs of being tampered with."

"No Biblical scholar of any standing today," says Weigall, "whether he be a clergyman or a layman, accepts the entire New Testament as authentic; all admit that many errors, misunderstandings and absurdities have crept into the story of Christ's life and other matters."

"The earliest part of the canon, in the opinion of all competent authorities, are the Epistles of Paul, and those of I Thessalonians... In it, as in all other Pauline Epistles, there is a complete lack of any reference... to the four Gospels, so it is a fair inference that they did not exist in Paul's lifetime..."

"He [Paul] was put to death, according to the most probable guess, in the year 64. At some time during the next ten years... the Gospel of Mark was written. Who the author was we do not know with certainty, but... a reference at the end of I Peter... makes him the companion and amanuensis of Peter. ...Mark himself, if he ever saw Jesus at all, saw him only as a boy."

"The other Gospels are plainly later. Those [other Synoptic Gospels] of Matthew and Luke lean heavily upon Mark, and almost as heavily upon a lost Gospel, to which the German critics long ago gave the designation of Q, from the German word Quelle == source. Of the two, the Gospel of Luke seems to be the older. ...probably written after the year 70, for there are passages in it which are generally taken to refer to the destruction of Jerusalem in that year..."

"There is no reason to believe that Luke ever saw Jesus. All the evidence indicates that he was converted to the new faith by Paul, who made a companion of him. and took him on various missionary journeys. ...He also wrote the Acts of the Apostles, again in the form of a letter to Theophilus..."

"The Gospel of Matthew belongs to a somewhat later date—possibly to the closing years of the First Century. That it was written by the Apostle Matthew is next to impossible, for he must have been older that Jesus and by the year 90... a centenarian. But it is not unlikely that the author... made use of memoranda left by the Apostle, and these... may have constituted the Q document."

"A statement by one Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis (circa 140)... "Matthew composed logia in Hebrew, and everyone interpreted them as he was able." These logia, which seem to have consisted mainly of the sayings of Jesus, may have been in general circulation... , and the author of Matthew may have written them into his Gospel, just as he wrote in much of Mark. ...perhaps the faithful mistook the whole work for the Apostle's and so gave it its present name... we know... that it... bore that name about the year 185."

"The Gospel of John is still later: it was probably not written until the end of the First Century... not later than 125. The identity of the author remains in doubt. He was apparently the same who wrote the two Epistles of John... but not the John who wrote Revelation, which is earlier. The remaining books of the New Testament are of varying dates, and show varying degrees of authenticity."

"The New Testament is... a historical document of very tolerable authority, needing only to be read with due circumspection. If there are some palpable stretchers in it, then stretchers of the same sort are to be found in most of the secular histories of its remote and innocent age. If it is sometimes contradictory, puerile and absurd, then so are they. One might hesitate to liken it to any modern work of first credibility... but it is certainly quite as sound as Parson Weems' "Life of Washington," or "Uncle Tom's Cabin."."

"The Old Testament as history, is on a much lower level, though as poetry it has never been surpassed in the world. It is partly the product, in the form with which we are familiar, of the Jews who had been touched by the Greek enlightenment, but the essential parts of it are purely Asiatic in origin, and so they show a great deal more florid fancy than historical conscience. It is at once a book of laws, a collection of chronicles and genealogies, and a series of prophetical tracts, hymn books, erotic rhapsodies, and primitive novels."

"Parallels to the New Testament, and especially to the Epistles, are to be found in the belles lettres of both Greece and Rome, but to find anything resembling the Old Testament one must go to such completely oriental documents as the Code of Manu, the Persian Avesta, the Indian Vedas, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead."

"The Old Testament... especially in the first five books, the so-called Pentateuch... reeks with irreconcilable contradictions and patent imbecilities. ...Such things must have been noticed by sensible men at a very early time; we know, indeed, that there were bitter controversies... But it was not until the Twelfth Century of our era that the Pentateuch as a whole was subjected to rational scrutiny. The man who undertook the ungrateful task was a learned Spanish rabbi, Abraham ben Meir ibn Esra. He unearthed many absurdities, but he had to be very careful about discussing them, and it was not until five hundred years later that anything properly describable as scientific criticism... came into being. Its earliest shining lights were the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes [with his Leviathan], and the Amsterdam Jew, Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza's "Tractatus Theologico-politicus," published in 1670, made the first really formidable onslaught upon the inspired inerrancy of the Pentateuch. It called attention to scores of transparent imbecilities... including a dozen or more palpable geographical and historical impossibilities... The answer of constituted authorities was to suppress the "Tractatus," but enough copies got out... and ever since then the Old Testament has been under searching and devastating examination. The first conspicuous contributor... was a French priest, Richard Simon, but since then the Germans have had more to do with it than any other people, and so it is common for American Christians to think of the so-called Higher Criticism as a German invention."

"The Protestant Reformation was far more political and economic in origin than theological. ...the church had become too powerful ...As wealth increased, it got so much more than its fair share that presently it was... almost as rich as kings and emperor together. ...it had armies to enforce its decrees; it punished rebellion as savagely as any Mesopotamian potentate. The kings all hated it because it pitted one against another and was opposed to the national states that they were trying to fashion; the nobles hated it because its ubiquitous priests stood between them and their serfs; the common people hated it because its exactions kept them poor. ...There was a new economic order in the world and a new political order, and it was out of harmony with both. Knowledge was increasing faster than it could revise its theology: what had seemed indubitable... and at least believed in... now began to look absurd to all sensible men."

"The [Protestant] Reformers were men of courage, but not many of them were intelligent. ...Few of them seem to have noticed that in rejecting the authority of the popes and setting up the Bible as the sole guide to faith and conduct they were setting up something that bore the mark of the popes on almost every page."

"Once the faithful began to search the sacred texts there was an efflorescence of theological extravagance unmatched since the days of the early Fathers, and the new church quickly split into a multitude of factions. That process... continues to this day, with the result that Protestantism... remains a feeble force in the world, and has very little influence upon the mainstream of human thought. Its theology... is quite as preposterous as that of the church of Rome, and its practices... are quite lacking in Roman dignity. It has produced some of the most appalling theologians ever heard of..."

"Protestantism... naturally turned with most curiosity to what Catholicism had kept under cover—that is, to the apocalyptic parts of the New Testament and to the more florid and inflammatory sections of the Old. Today, its God bears the name of the New Testament Father, but, as ordinarily encountered, He is far more the Yahweh of the Old—crafty, cruel, jealous, bellicose, irrational, and vain. ...In its purer forms, it is almost a reversion to the religion of primitive man."

"Luther...was the theologian par excellence—cocksure, dictatorial, grasping, self-indulgent, vulgar and ignorant. "Demons," he once wrote, "live everywhere, but are especially common in Germany. On a high mountain called the Polterberg there is a pool full of them: they are held captive there by Satan. If a storm is thrown in a great storm arises and the whole countryside is overwhelmed. Many deaf persons and cripples were made so by the Devil's malice. Plagues, fevers and all sorts of other evils come from him." Much more of the same general tenor is to be found in Luther's writings. His followers of today, forgetting everything of the sort, remember only his sonorous declarations of freedom of conscience that, in truth, he never believed in."

"John Calvin... set up an Asiatic despotism of his own, modeled upon that of the pope. ...The high point of his career was the brutal burning of Servetus, one of the most brilliant men of his time. Calvin was the Paul of early Protestantism, and the greatest of all the Protestant theologians. To this day his gloomy and nonsensical ideas remain in high esteem among the faithful... He was the true father of Puritanism, which is to say, of the worst obscenity of Western civilization."

"The Modern era was brought in, not by the Reformation, but by the Renaissance, which preceded it in time and greatly exceeded it in scope and dignity. The Renaissance was reversion to the spacious paganism of Greece and Rome; as someone has well said, it was a bouleversement of all principles of Christianity. Its test for ideas was not the authority behind them but the probability in them. It was immensely curious, ingenious, skeptical and daring—in brief, everything that Christianity was not. Unfortunately, its intuitions ran far ahead of its knowledge, and so, while it left all enlightened men convinced that Christian theology was a farrago of absurdities, all it had to offer in place of that theology was a body of exact facts, explaining the cosmos and man's place in it in rational terms. The task of accumulating those facts fell upon the Seventeenth Century, and the light began to dawn toward its close. One by one the basic mysteries yielded to a long line of extraordinarily brilliant and venturesome men—Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Harvey, and Leeuwenhoek among them. The universe ceased to be Yahweh's plaything and became a mechanism like any other, responding to the same immutable laws. The world dwindled to the estate of what A. J. Balfour called "one of the meanest of planets." Man became an animal—the noblest of them all, but still an animal. Heaven and Hell sank to the level of old wives' tales, and there was a vast collapse of Trinities, Virgin Births, Atonements and other such pious phantasms. The Seventeenth Century, and especially the latter half thereof, saw greater progress than had been made in the twenty centuries preceding—almost as much, indeed, as was destined to be made in the Nineteenth and Twentieth."